GitLab announced the launch of GitLab 18, including AI capabilities natively integrated into the platform and major new innovations across core DevOps, and security and compliance workflows that are available now, with further enhancements planned throughout the year.
The following are emerging DevOps trends for 2018, from Alfresco:
Agile Development
Software Delivery Will Accelerate in 2018
Digital leaders will outpace their rivals by adopting methodologies and mindsets that shorten software delivery cycles. They'll also get really, really good at rapid, iterative change following design thinking principles
Digital leaders will rely more and more on Agile development methods — short sprints, scrum teams and user feedback loops — to accelerate the design, development, testing and acceptance of new applications. With its emphasis on rapid iteration and continuous improvement, Agile methodologies are quickly becoming a proven way for companies to churn out new innovations quickly. Studies already show that Agile approaches average 50 percent faster time-to-market than waterfall ones.
DevOps will become a greater catalyst for speed. Automation and tighter collaboration between development and operations will make it easier to put new code into production. Led by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, the world will continue to move away from "that ten-year-old solution everyone's afraid to touch" to evergreen applications that are updated multiple times a day.
Application Performance Management
Companies Will Adopt New Application Architectures and Infrastructures
Digital leaders will build in flexibility with new application architectures and deployment models. They'll leave legacy systems behind as they wholeheartedly embrace the cloud with microservices-based solutions.
Monolithic applications are hard to change, costly to maintain, and ill-suited to today's dynamic business environment. That's why digital leaders will move even faster to an agile, microservices-driven architecture.
Assembling applications from small modular services — each a self-contained building block — will allow digital leaders to transform quickly and at scale. They will be able to mix and match services to fast-track new digital offerings and processes. They will tweak and scale services to adapt to changing business models and customer expectations. And they will push innovation across the enterprise by reusing services — all without adding armies of developers or getting locked into any one technology.
Application Programming Interfaces
Enterprises Will Integrate Data and Systems in Transformative Ways
Digital leaders will use open platforms and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in greater numbers to integrate information, automate processes, and connect people across their extended value chain. These connections will lay the foundation for faster business flows and new digital products and services.
2018 will be all about maximizing the use of APIs to enable diverse applications to connect and share data. Digital leaders will use API-led integration to combine services and expose information in ways that deliver unprecedented customer and business value. They are already finding that within days and without lots of coding, they can roll out service innovations, revamp internal processes, enliven customer interactions, extend their digital reach, and enable entirely new business models.
End User Experience Management
2018 Will Herald an Era of Closer Business and IT Collaboration
Digital leaders will treat digital transformation as a partnership between business and IT, with a shared focus on meaningful outcomes and better experiences for customers and employees.
Digital leaders will put people — customers, citizens, employees and partners — at the center of their transformation efforts. They will prioritize design thinking, a user-centric approach that shifts the focus from adding features to adding value. They will take advantage of platform tooling to involve users in solution design and invest in dedicated UX teams to deliver better experiences faster. The list of proponents of design thinking is only expected to grow in the coming year.
Another winning strategy will be to empower users with self-service tools that add business agility. Self-service analytics for rapid decision-making and process services that make it easy for users to modify workflows as business needs change will become more common across companies in the new year.
Industry News
Perforce Software is partnering with Siemens Digital Industries Software to transform how smart, connected products are designed and developed.
Reply launched Silicon Shoring, a new software delivery model powered by Artificial Intelligence.
CIQ announced the tech preview launch of Rocky Linux from CIQ for AI (RLC-AI), an operating system engineered and optimized for artificial intelligence workloads.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the launch of the Cybersecurity Skills Framework, a global reference guide that helps organizations identify and address critical cybersecurity competencies across a broad range of IT job families; extending beyond cybersecurity specialists.
CodeRabbit is now available on the Visual Studio Code editor.
The integration brings CodeRabbit’s AI code reviews directly into Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code at the earliest stages of software development—inside the code editor itself—at no cost to the developers.
Chainguard announced Chainguard Libraries for Python, an index of malware-resistant Python dependencies built securely from source on SLSA L2 infrastructure.
Sysdig announced the donation of Stratoshark, the company’s open source cloud forensics tool, to the Wireshark Foundation.
Pegasystems unveiled Pega Predictable AI™ Agents that give enterprises extraordinary control and visibility as they design and deploy AI-optimized processes.
Kong announced the introduction of the Kong Event Gateway as a part of their unified API platform.
Azul and Moderne announced a technical partnership to help Java development teams identify, remove and refactor unused and dead code to improve productivity and dramatically accelerate modernization initiatives.
Parasoft has added Agentic AI capabilities to SOAtest, featuring API test planning and creation.
Zerve unveiled a multi-agent system engineered specifically for enterprise-grade data and AI development.
LambdaTest, a unified agentic AI and cloud engineering platform, has announced its partnership with MacStadium, the industry-leading private Mac cloud provider enabling enterprise macOS workloads, to accelerate its AI-native software testing by leveraging Apple Silicon.
Tricentis announced a new capability that injects Tricentis’ AI-driven testing intelligence into SAP’s integrated toolchain, part of RISE with SAP methodology.